The Albanian Candidate

With Mysterious Deal Undone, Democrat Winds Up In Kosovo

It was a huge deal, as Jim Griffin told it, a $20 billion agreement involving Merrill Lynch, the Catholic Church and Boeing to buy jet planes and real estate for Mother Teresa's order of nuns.

And there was something about helping the Greek Orthodox Church rebuild churches destroyed in the Balkans war.

Right in the middle of it all was Griffin, a Bristol Democrat, West Point grad and former White House aide embarking on his 1998 congressional run. In fact, Griffin told anyone who asked, it was his $400,000 commission on the $20 billion deal that helped finance his quest last year for the Democratic nomination in the 6th District.

FOR THE RECORD - Correction published May 26, 1999.* A story about Jim Griffin on Page 1 Sunday described a financial deal allegedy involving the Little Sisters of the Poor, which Griffin described as Mother Teresa's order of nuns. Mother Teresa's order is called the Missionaries of Charity and is not connected to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Griffin's campaign vaporized, amid accusations that he throttled his campaign manager and signed his dead treasurer's name to a federal election filing. And now it appears that the $20 billion deal -- and Griffin's commissions from it -- never really happened at all.

Recently obtained documents and interviews show that much of the $400,000 he pumped into the Friends of Jim Griffin '98 Committee was actually loaned to him by an Albanian-American real estate investor from New York, Nua ``Tony'' Shala, who was looking for a friend in Congress.

But Griffin didn't win, so now he's working off his debt on the shadowy fringes of the war in Yugoslavia, trading on his knowledge of Washington to help Shala gain access to officials in the Pentagon and White House. Shala's motives appear to range from idealistic to entrepreneurial: He has urged U.S. support for the war, while arranging to fill his apartment buildings with ethnic Albanian refugees and to solicit funds for orphaned Kosovar children.

The story of Griffin's journey from his Bristol campaign headquarters to a Kosovo Liberation Army outpost is a strange tale, equal parts Oliver North and Maxwell Smart. Its characters include KLA guerrillas, old West Pointers with exaggerated connections to the Vatican and Wall Street, and a well- wired Washington lawyer with a reputation for shady financial dealings.

It is a trail not easily followed, in part because of Griffin's dark hints of secret missions that can't be discussed and his tendency to amend his story when confronted with inconsistencies. But the trail must be followed, if for no other reason than to understand his latest claim:

Jim Griffin helped launch the war in Kosovo.

A Really Big Deal

Chuck Burns remembers Griffin telling him how he earned $400,000 in commissions and was expecting $1 million more. Burns thought it sounded a little strange, but as Griffin's campaign manager, he was counting on the money to produce television ads for the nomination fight against Charlotte Koskoff.

``It was all very shady and mysterious,'' Burns said. ``I asked him about it once, and he explained in a sort of left-handed way that he was working with the Greek Orthodox Church. I didn't want to know the details.''

Griffin told different stories to different people. Sometimes the Greek Orthodox Church was mentioned, other times it wasn't. In several news accounts last year, and again in a recent interview, Griffin described the $20 billion deal this way:

An old West Point friend named Scott Silva, who was ``in charge of special accounts'' at Merrill Lynch in Boston, had handled some investments for Shala, and was looking for someone with government experience to help him airlift relief supplies to the Balkans. Griffin agreed to introduce Shala to federal officials in Washington.

Not long after, Griffin said, he put Silva in touch with another West Point friend, William Siwy, a former Connecticut resident now living in California. Griffin has told people Siwy has high-ranking connections to the Catholic Church, and one of Siwy's business associates, Washington lawyer Lewis Rivlin, has described him as ``financial counsel to the Lumin Christi,'' a mysterious investment fund supposedly run out of the Vatican.

That introduction led to a meeting in late February 1998 between Griffin, Silva and Siwy at Rivlin's office, where the $20 billion deal was born: Merrill Lynch would broker the purchase of Boeing 737's to be used as aerial hospitals by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who also would acquire real estate from Shala to establish a mission in New York City. As the group was finishing up, Rivlin announced that Griffin was entitled to a commission for helping put them all together.

``I'm sitting there watching this, and I can't believe what I'm watching, because they're talking about very large sums of money moving around,'' Griffin told the Journal Inquirer newspaper of Manchester last year.

But within a few months of the meeting in Rivlin's office, it was becoming clear at Griffin '98 campaign headquarters that the candidate's plan to bankroll his race with profits from the Silva-Siwy-Rivlin deal was unraveling. As the original $400,000 fund dwindled, Griffin kept promising that Siwy or Shala would send them more money soon, said Burns and three other former campaign staffers interviewed.